Thread: DPAD | Gaming & Finance OT| Strictly Business
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Grisham
Ensuring Transparency
Without a major Final Fantasy release, Square Enix sales are down this year
Square Enix has detailed its financial results for the current financial year up to 31st December 2022, and recorded an…
www.eurogamer.net
Square Enix has detailed its financial results for the current financial year up to 31st December 2022, and recorded an annual fall in sales and income.
The Final Fantasy publisher recorded net sales of 255bn yen (£1.6bn), down nearly seven percent on the same nine-month time period year-on-year. Operating income was 41bn yen (£258m), down nearly 18 percent on the same time period year-on-year.
Over the nine months ending 31st December 2022, Square Enix launched a large number of games but lacked a major Final Fantasy release. Instead, between April and December 2022, Square Enix released Nintendo Switch exclusive Live a Live, fantasy farming sim Harvestella, The Diofield Chronicle, Valkyrie Elysium, Tactics Ogre: Reborn, and Star Ocean: The Divine Force, among others.
Over the same period during the previous financial year, Square Enix notably launched Final Fantasy 7 Remake for PC and PlayStation 5, plus smaller games such as Neo: The World Ends with You, and various Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster title for Windows and mobile. Also, this period saw the arrival of Final Fantasy 14 expansion Endwalker.
The biggest Final Fantasy launch over the past nine months was Crisis Core: Final Fantasy 7 Reunion, a remake of the series' PSP prequel.
Forspoken, Square Enix's latest release, arrived too recently to be included in these latest results.
Square Enix will likely expect a far stronger set of results in the coming financial year, which will see Final Fantasy 16 arrive on 22nd June. Rebirth, the second part of the publisher's Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy, is then expected late this year or early in 2024.
Elsewhere in the coming year, Square Enix said it did not have any further expansions planned in the short-term for Final Fantasy 14, but would continue to support the MMO with new events.
Grisham
Ensuring Transparency
Take-Two reported its earnings for the third quarter today, showing increased sales and net losses just like the first two quarters of its fiscal year, with the added disappointment of missing its own revenue and bookings forecasts.
Accordingly, it also downgraded its full-year revenue projections, and cautioned investors that net losses would be deeper than previously expected.
Take-Two attributed the soft sales to larger market forces at work in the holiday quarter, saying consumers focused their money toward established blockbusters and deeply discounted titles, trends that helped Take-Two's back catalog but impacted new releases.
Take-Two's biggest releases for the quarter included the current-gen versions of Marvel's Midnight Sons, PGA Tour 2K23, and New Tales from the Borderlands, none of which received sales figures or cracked the company's list of largest revenue contributors.
Instead the strongest performances for Take-Two's holiday quarter came from NBA 2K23, NBA 2K22, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Online, Empires & Puzzles, Toon Blast, Rollic's hyper-casual portfolio, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Online, Words With Friends, Merge Dragons, and Toy Blast.
NBA 2K23 has now sold-in more than 8 million units (up more than 3 million from the previous quarter), while Grand Theft Auto 5 reached the 175 million sales mark and Red Dead Redemption 2 had a stronger-than-expected 4 million copies sold to finish the quarter with more than 50 million copies sold lifetime-to-date.
More at the link
www.gamesindustry.biz
Accordingly, it also downgraded its full-year revenue projections, and cautioned investors that net losses would be deeper than previously expected.
Take-Two Interactive Q3 fiscal '23 numbers
- Revenue: $1.41 billion (up 56% year-over-year, but beneath the forecasted range of $1.43 billion to $1.48 billion)
- Bookings: $1.38 billion (up 60% year-over-year, but beneath the forecasted range of $1.41 billion to $1.46 billion)
- Net Loss: $153 million (compared to a $144 million net profit in the year-ago quarter)
Take-Two forecast
- Full-year GAAP revenue forecast: $5.24 billion to $5.29 billion (previously $5.4 billion to $5.51 billion in revenue)
- Full-year GAAP net loss forecast: $704 million to $721 million (previously a $631 million to $674 million net loss)
Take-Two attributed the soft sales to larger market forces at work in the holiday quarter, saying consumers focused their money toward established blockbusters and deeply discounted titles, trends that helped Take-Two's back catalog but impacted new releases.
Take-Two's biggest releases for the quarter included the current-gen versions of Marvel's Midnight Sons, PGA Tour 2K23, and New Tales from the Borderlands, none of which received sales figures or cracked the company's list of largest revenue contributors.
Instead the strongest performances for Take-Two's holiday quarter came from NBA 2K23, NBA 2K22, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Online, Empires & Puzzles, Toon Blast, Rollic's hyper-casual portfolio, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Online, Words With Friends, Merge Dragons, and Toy Blast.
NBA 2K23 has now sold-in more than 8 million units (up more than 3 million from the previous quarter), while Grand Theft Auto 5 reached the 175 million sales mark and Red Dead Redemption 2 had a stronger-than-expected 4 million copies sold to finish the quarter with more than 50 million copies sold lifetime-to-date.
More at the link
Take-Two misses sales guidance, downgrades forecast again
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www.gamesindustry.biz
Sales numbers from Bloodborne, 7,5 million.
www.tweaktown.com
PlayStation first-party game sales: Bloodborne at 7.5 million as of early 2022
New leaks offer a rare opportunity to update first-party Sony game sales, with lesser-reported games like Bloodborne have actually sold many millions.
www.tweaktown.com
Eneru
Member
Sales numbers from Bloodborne, 7,5 million.
PlayStation first-party game sales: Bloodborne at 7.5 million as of early 2022
New leaks offer a rare opportunity to update first-party Sony game sales, with lesser-reported games like Bloodborne have actually sold many millions.
Last of us at 18.5 million. Last of us 2 at 9. Is it all of last of us (ps3,4 and 5?) or what
It was the tech industry last year and now it's the gaming industry. Hopefully it's all the DEI rolls but doubtful.
Bernd Lauert
LTTP
- Platforms
Projection:
Reality:
Result: mass layoffs.
With high inflation and cost increases for basically everything (energy, services, hardware, rent etc.) well in the double digits after COVID, I can totally see how that growth isn't nearly enough to offset it.
Bernd Lauert
LTTP
- Platforms
The problem is that other media types (TV/movies, audio, books...) are doing just fine. Only gaming is suffering for some reason.
Uhm. No they don't. Disney laid off 7000 last year and basically everyone is committed to lay off more this year
Media layoffs: Google, Paramount, Disney, and others commit to job cuts in 2024
The media and entertainment industry's reckoning will continue in 2024 with more layoffs underway.
Many companies are impacted, also in other sectors like in the industry.
Eneru
Member
"Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation."
Games for shareholders. That's why the industry goes to shit. Yep.
Damn. They went on that huge acquiring spree just to cancel everything and fire a bunch of people.
Eneru
Member
Is it embraced they belong to?
Insanity. Sony should give the studio a Budget of 30 mil and they should create a game within this budget. Then they wouldn't just release one game per generation..
Grisham
Ensuring Transparency
Polden
Member
- Platforms
Let me reword that
"We horribly mismanaged our growth so we have to massively cut jobs to keep executive salaries ideal. To make sure that we have not learned our lesson, we will blame outside factors."
GTA 6 Developers Criticise Rockstar’s ‘Reckless’ Decision to Force Staff Back to the Office - IGN
Developers at Rockstar Games have hit out at the company’s decision to force staff to return to the office five days a week to close out work on GTA 6.
Grisham
Ensuring Transparency
Grisham
Ensuring Transparency
$70 games ‘will go the way of the dodo’, believes Saber CEO | VGC
The former interim Embracer COO believes developers will move to reduce risk and costs…
www.videogameschronicle.com
Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch believes the '$70 game' will eventually become a thing of the past, as developers move to reduce costs and risk in an increasingly challenging AAA games market.
Speaking to IGN, former interim COO of Embracer Karch discussed Saber's divestment from the troubled group, and where he sees Saber's place in the market as a standalone publisher.
The exec said he believes Saber, which encompasses studios like Nimble Giant (Star Trek Infinite), 3D Realms (Ion Fury), and potentially 4A Games (Metro), occupies a position between independent studios and AAA publishers.
Karch cited Helldivers 2 as an example of the type of "middle market" game it would like to emulate. He told IGN that one of its upcoming titles, Space Marine 2, will retail for $70, but only because he's concerned audiences would see a cheaper price as emblematic of poor quality.
"I think that as games become more expensive to make, the $70 title is going to go the way of the dodo [bird]. I do," he said.
"I just don't think it's sustainable… Look, you remember the hype for Cyberpunk, which I think actually ultimately performed okay, but when the expectations are so high and so much money is put into one title, it's hugely risky for the company that's doing it. What if it fails?
"You remember what happened when Ubisoft a couple of years ago, all their titles slipped out of the year, and then all of a sudden they were in an entirely different place? It's hard to recover from that.
"I think the market is going to shift to development which is not necessarily lower quality, but there's going to be an emphasis on trying to find ways to reduce costs."
With thousands of job cuts announced across the games industry in the past 18 months, Karch acknowledged that AAA development is going through a major shift and claimed that past trends of sky-high budgets and lengthy development periods aren't sustainable.
"I think that there's going to be a real shortage of game content over the coming few years," he said. "You've seen how many layoffs there's been, you see how many games have gotten killed. But we have a lot of good projects going on that I'm proud of and that I feel really, really strongly about."
Just read on LinkedIn that Take Two (2k, Rockstar, Zynga) announced that it's cutting 5% of its workforce. This 550+ people getting let go. It's also said that they canceled "several in development projects". Take that last comment as you like.
No idea yet where the cuts are specifically coming from.
No idea yet where the cuts are specifically coming from.
Take Two management:
Take-Two laying off 5% of staff
Take-Two Interactive is embarking on another cost cutting program, and this one will see the company layoff about 5% of…
www.gamesindustry.biz
Also the CEO a few months ago:
Take-Two doubled its executive's pay last year
Take-Two has doubled the pay of its top executives, as detailed in its annual proxy filing. The publisher has doubled p…
www.gamesindustry.biz
I think this is worthy of a thread on its own, also the twitter junkies in this forum have been sleeping on the job not sharing this already.
Looks like Splash Damage has laid off a decent amount of people. I have seen at least 2 dozen posts on LinkedIn since yesterday. Looks like its the result of the Transformer game they were working on getting canceled. I worked with Splash Damage almost a decade ago as a Producer on the publishing side. Good group, but they played things a little loose. The stories I could tell..... But I thought they got purchased by Tencent a few years back. So a little surprised.
www.gamesindustry.biz
Splash Damage jobs at risk following Transformers: Reactivate cancellation
Splash Damage has cancelled its 1-4 player online action game, Transformers: Reactivate, putting an unknown number of j…
www.gamesindustry.biz